Category Archives: Tuatha Dé Rising

Over a year ago, I had the first public reading of an excerpt from Tuatha de Rising at Phoenix Comicon. This year I attended the con again, lounging mostly in the writers seminars again, but this time felt a little different. This year I came in having finished my first novel. I used to be daunted when I saw the number of people in the writing panels. Now I feel more accomplished. I’ve finished it, I’m editing it, I’ve got beta readers for it, and now I’m just daunted by the prospect of trying to get it published…

The writer’s group has really been helpful. There’s nothing that breaks me out of writer’s block like a deadline.

Phoenix Comicon has a whole slew of programming for authors, and two of them were Writer’s Critique groups. It required signing up in advance, and the queue formed an hour before sign up would begin. Authors would have two minutes to read a short piece or excerpt from a larger work, then would get feedback from professional authors. The wonderful authors that volunteered for this were Sharon Skinner and Tom Leveen.

I was working with a first draft of a section of Tuatha dé Rising that focuses entirely on a performance delivered only through movement. My first concern was whether I had hit the right balance of describing movement so that the reader could see what was happening, without getting into such intricate detail that the pacing slogged. My second concern was that the scene was viewed from two different visual modes: One from the audience and one from a character seeing the world through the sight of the supernatural beings in Tuatha dé Rising. The second concern I wanted to address was whether the way I chose to present the visual differences created the effects I was hoping for. Trying to strip down the draft so that my two minute reading could present both of these concerns was a valuable exercise in itself.